


Crystal In The Blood

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Crystal Singer Trilogy - Anne McCaffrey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-20
Updated: 2008-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:21:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1626446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Story by KacyCallum</p><p>How Lanzecki came to join the Heptite Guild.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crystal In The Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Written for LadyFirebird

 

 

Crystal In The Blood

There are some things, he's heard, that you never forget.

But he knows, as he stands on Shankill Base with his possessions over one shoulder and his heart on his sleeve, that just isn't true. His throat is dry and his eyes are burning, and he's come for change or revenge or maybe just oblivion, because all of those are better than his memories. 

"Name?" says the bored man on the desk. 

"Lanzecki Mynos," he answers. "I want to join the Heptite Guild."

Same old, same old, says the young man's wry glance. "Certainly. You'll need to take pass the preliminary tests-"

Lanzecki is striding past him, blood thunder in his veins. "I will," he says curtly.

She did, after all, and they weren't so different once, before crystal consumed her memory.

~*~

She was there, always. 

His first memories are bright with her, as changeable as the weather. Her songs are preserved in his mind, always, though later he cannot put a name to the tunes that hunt him. Lullabies and folk songs and little ditties she makes up to drive away boredom. 

His sister and her music: they are inseparable. 

"Easy," she clucks, giggling as he tries to walk and topples to the ground in a pile. "Mama, mama, come and look!"

It's Maria who plays with him while his parents are out on the surface with the other colonists, overseeing the terraforming which will make them rich or break them down. It's her who brushes his hair with careful hands and who nurses him when summer fever reduces him to tears on his birthday. 

The planet is hard, a long slog. It will be years before it's truly colonised, and Lanzecki can't yet understand the lines on his father's brow, or his mother's calloused hands, but he knows they leave early each day and come back late each night, and read him a story once a week. 

But he doesn't mind. There's Maria, dark-haired, full of games and songs, and he'd much rather have her than do boring adult things. 

There's five years between them, but that never seems to matter much. She takes him out on the snowy hills one day with a second-hand sled that she saved up all her pocket-money to buy. Their parents wave them off, his father calling that it's a waste of good credits, but Maria only laughs and drags Lanzecki off in one hand and the sled in the other.

"You got your gloves?" she demands, nodding as he holds up mitten-covered hands for her approval. "Good. Now," she says and leans in, grinning, "I got a secret to tell you. And you mustn't tell Mama, and you definitely can't tell Papa or he'll go absolutely supernova."

His eyes widen. "A big secret?" he says.

She nods, squeezing his hand. "The biggest."

He waits, feet crunching on the ice as she drags it out with the flair of a natural actress. "It's a rocket-sled," she announced.

"Fardles," he breathes, a word he's heard his father use when he's amazed.

She slaps his wrist. "Don't use that word!" she says. "That's for grown-ups, not us."

He takes the rebuke placidly. She knows what's right and what's not, and right now the rocket-sled is more exciting than forbidden words. 

They carry on through the undulating hills, and she hums as she always does, though the sound is swallowed by the cold air. There are other children trekking out too, and she waves and calls to some of them, but she never leaves him. Even when she calls him _my stupid baby brother_ , he hears the smile in her voice, and knows her nonchalance is nothing more than a layer of cold on her affection, as impermanent as the snow. 

It all goes wrong, of course: the engineer who jerry-rigged the sled is only an apprentice, and so the sled goes screaming down the hill, flinging up great sprays of snow in their wake that sizzles on the scorched tracks they leave. 

They hit a stone wall - hard - and he wails loudly about his scraped knees while she huddles in the wreckage, white and trembling, until she pulls herself together. He doesn't see how she favours her right arm as she scoops him up and comforts him. 

It's only when they get home and she is swept off to the medics that he realises she was broken deep inside, deep enough for it to be hidden.

She comes back with a splint. He's worried that it's all gone wrong - that it was his fault for crying so loud that no one could see her hurting - but she smiles, and when he hears her humming old lullabies, he knows the world is right.

~*~

He's not surprised at fifteen when Maria announces she's going to join a choir. Their mother frowns and tells her that's not much use to a growing colony, not like learning to fix fliers or horse-riding, but Maria goes her own way, as she usually does. Lanzecki doubts it'll last long: she might have perfect pitch, but she flits from idea to idea, bright and lively and hungry for change.

He's wrong. Time passes and once a week, without fail, the door shuts and he's left alone to plough through his secondary studies, scowling at physics problems. 

Once a week becomes twice a week, and twice a week is sometimes three times a week. She's dreamy and distracted, and all the songs she hums are about love. 

And one day, she brings a boy home. It's all clear to Lanzecki then, and he watches them with some fascination. 

It hardly seems to be his sister there. She introduces him (whatever his name was, that's one thing he's forgotten without the lure of crystal, and good riddance to it), but after that, she hardly speaks to them. He's used to her shouting him down, but she's quiet and clinging to the boy in a way that makes Lanzecki puzzled and a little sad.

It's as if she's found him, and lost something of herself. 

Eventually, the boy breaks her heart. And maybe it would have been all right if it had been so _long_ , if it hadn't been so _cruel_ , if Lanzecki hadn't been a continent away finishing his tertiary education. There's a call from her that he misses because he's out getting his first taste of off-world beer. There's another he misses because he's sleeping off the drink between a pretty girl and a prettier boy. 

Two calls. Some time. And Maria herself, of course, he can't pretend she was nothing to do with it. Always a little wild, a little reckless. 

Perhaps she thought he didn't need her anymore. Perhaps she was just heartsick, or lonely, or angry.

Either way, he comes home a qualified engineer and finds her gone. His father's pacing up and down their small living quarters, a printout flapping in his hand. His mother is sat very still upon the couch, watching the wall.

"She said she wanted to forget," she says dreamily, as unlike his practical mother as he can imagine. "She said she met a man who could help her."

"He'll help her die," his father said, and the bitterness in his voice was startling. "We all know what the Heptite Guild does. You saw that...that creature that set up our comms links. Barely human, she was, cold as the damn crystals."

"That was only one..." his mother says, but there's no hope in her voice.

Later, when they're asleep, Lanzecki reads through the abandoned printout. He knows about crystal in its many varieties, but only as an instrument, a tool. 

He learns little. Mystery surrounds Ballybran like a fog, and that alone would have drawn Maria to it. He can imagine her departing in a whirlwind of energy, her mind bent on the future, desperate to leave it all behind. It will be another fad, he thinks: she'll get to the moonbase, and turn back, the commitment too much. 

Their quarters are hollow without her. He gets a good job, an exciting job where he can put his hard-won skills to good use, and although he wonders about her, although he misses her, he thinks no more upon it. 

Then she returns.

~*~

He's twenty five by then, and doing all the things an ambitious man does: switching from base to base chasing ever-better jobs, networking with the right people, starting to look beyond their small planet for his next position. His charm and his tact carry him along with ease. 

He has his own place, furnished with second-hand furniture and first-rate systems. When the door buzzes, he's a little bemused - it's late enough to be considered early - but he answers.

In the first moments, he barely recognises the woman standing there. She's lean and tanned, but her face is marred by dozens of thin shiny scars, and somehow harder than he remembers. 

Then she tilts her head, and smiles. "Not who you were expecting?"

"Not until now," he answers, but when he reaches out to embrace her, she withdraws.

They spend the night talking over beer, and changes become apparent. Her smiles are less frequent and less sincere: her eyes only light when they speak of crystal singing, but she says nothing of people, only of things, of deep blues and the way that clear greens cry out and how she races against the mach storms. 

When he asks about friends, Maria gives him a fleeting, startled look before covering quickly with names of other singers, but he has seen the truth, and it chills him.

She has no friends. Only crystal.

~*~

The next year, when she come to visit, she is thinner and tougher and the crystal scars are a lattice upon her face and arms. Her smiles are emptier, and there is something odd about her presence that he can only place in her absence: she no longer sings. 

Once a year, she visits. By the time he's thirty, he has become used to her haphazard visits. 

Women come and go: his affairs are discreet and smoothly conducted. Only once does he think it love, and is wrong. 

She listens to him pouring out his heart, then he says, "How did you cope?" 

Maria looks back blankly. "With what?" she says.

All he can think is that she got her wish. And off she goes, back to the shooting star that granted it, to encase herself in crystal and storms. 

Then a year passes, and she does not come. 

It's only another six months before he takes some leave and goes to Shankill Moonbase. When he tells the woman at the desk he's visiting family, she gives him a sceptical look, but promises to send a message down to the surface after he charms her into it. 

The creature that comes up from Ballybran is hardly human. He reels back from the reek of her: she's wild-eyed and incoherent, grabbing at his wrists and babbling about a triad of purples she cut in the Milekey Range, about how it'll take her off-planet, far enough for now, far enough, far enough...

"You should have taken care of yourself first," he says gently.

Her look is direct and innocent. "But I might have forgotten."

He is silenced, aghast. Then at last, he finds his voice. "I think that unlikely-"

"I can't remember what planet I came from," she says, and then she looks away, proud still. "Lanzecki...I only know your name because it's in my voice records. That's all I have in them. I didn't want to remember anything else when I first came and now...now it's too late."

"Our parents?" he says, disbelieving, unable to comprehend what she says. His own memories are complete and vivid, and she is the greater part of them. 

"I didn't record anything about them." She swallowed. "I must have wanted to forget."

He's reeling. "Exactly how much have you forgotten?"

Her laugh is tired, brittle as crystal shards. "Almost everything."

Lanzecki is frightened then, but he hides it under a smooth face and careful talk. Even after she has bathed and slung on clean clothes, even when she looks something like Maria again, it only serves to emphasise how little of her truly remains. Her smiles are little more than shadows now, her humour drained away. At dinner, he hums one of her old tunes, certain that will unlock some lost piece of his sister.

She only glances up from her food and says, "What's that? Latest galatic hit?"

There's nothing Lanzecki can say to that: like her, he no longer knows the words. 

~*~

Despite it, he visits her at least twice every galactic year. But she is drifting ever further from him, her memories whittled away, her personality fading along with them until she is nothing but the need for crystal, the love of crystal, the world delineated by planes and fractures and edges sharp as knives.

He becomes her archive, the only one who knows what she truly was, what he still believes she truly is beneath it all. 

She's his sister, and he loves her, and some part of him remembers how she took care of him. She's chained to Ballybran, though he doubts she would see it that way, but he offers her what little he can.

Then the day he did not know to fear comes. The message originates from the Heptite Guild. And couched within formal language is the brutal truth: Maria is dead. 

His inquiries bring only stilted answers. Eventually he ekes the full story from the guild. A race with a mach storm, but this time she lost, caught in thrall by a crystal that shattered in her hands and took her mind with it. 

The grief overtakes him. To them she is a dry statistic, another of the fifty-three percent of their membership who are snatched each year, sacrifices on a crystal altar. 

It cannot go on, he vows. Or perhaps what he truly means is that he cannot go on. 

His good job and his good life seem irrelevant. He watched her wither, watch her fade, and he could do nothing. He finds himself becoming obsessed with the membership of the Heptite Guild, watching its numbers slowly diminish. He is seized with slow anger and purpose, with the feeling that it isn't right, that there must be more someone can do.

It's inevitable, really. One day, there's a ship bound for Shankill Moonbase, the same one he used to catch twice a year, and this time Lanzecki only buys a single fare out. 

He passes the same stars she did. The journey is burned into his mind. And he's determined he won't forget, because there has to be one person in all the Guild who knows what memory means. One person who can remember all the ones the rest forgot, who can see past an addiction. He can be controlled where others are desperate, calm where they are crazed, mercenary where they are nothing but their need for the Ranges and the carrion call of crystal. 

It has to be him. His only problem will be remembering it. 

But Lanzecki knows he'll never love crystal, never surrender to its songs. He'll hate it, glory in its death screams, treat it like the enemy it is. It elevates him, and isolates him from the others. 

When they speak of thrall, he smiles coldly, because he's sure he could never be seduced so easily. 

But he's forgotten: the one thing in all the long years he can neither remember nor truly know until the last moment, until he's too old and too weary and a mach storm sweeps him away on a crystal-crazed wave into change or revenge or maybe just oblivion. 

It's in his blood. 

~*~ 

 


End file.
